Christmas Magic

Every year, I set out with my sister, Sandy and my sister-in-law, Jessica to achieve the Holy Grail of our Christmas time existence, a family portrait of all of our children. They are seven in number, our little angels, ranging in ages from 15 months to 12 years. Individually, they are, how shall we sayyyyy, "challenging" to their respective moms. However, when combined, they become a supernatural force that could only be characterized as "impossible" - as in impossible to corral, impossible to cajole, and impossible to not kill.

Like army generals, we met up early this year to plan out the mission down to the tiniest detail. Naps for the little ones- check. Non-messy food with which to bribe the little ones- check. Empty promises of "prizes" for the best behaved big kid- check. Everything should have fallen into place as planned. We left nothing to chance. Oh, but once again, we underestimated the power of seven.

It seems in our zealousness to arrive early at the picture site, we overshot the time of sunset and had to improvise with alternate sites while waiting for the sun to set. Well, we might as well have said, "Scatter to the winds, young ones, and never look baaaack" because that is precisely what they did. The big ones took off to climb a retaining wall adjacent to where we were and the little ones started climbing a big dirty hill next to the wall. We would catch a couple of them at a time and take a few pictures and before they could so much as say cheese, the others would be off on some other dirt covered endeavor.

When the sun finally started to cooperate, we began to arrange all the kids on the wall where we planned for the blessed event to take place. The best way to describe the process of coordinating seven kids is to conjure the image of one person desperately trying to spin seven plates at once and never quite getting them all going. Sandy took something like 150 pictures trying to get one shot that would work. Unfortunately, the longer it took, the worse our chances got of getting anything that would work.

The picture above is the final result. All seven lined up atop the wall, the delights of their mother's hearts, Emerson hamming it up, Campbell too sick to bear one more minute, Lauren angelic as always, and all the boys, behaving for once and at once. Not the perfect picture that we had in mind, but pretty darn close.